Oracle Blog

Phil Harman's Weblog

The Liverpool University Benchmark

The second SPARCcenter2000 in the UK went to Liverpool University. They had the full complement of
20 CPUs, and were running Solaris 2.2 (which was not certified beyond 8 CPUs). Their acceptance tests
consisted of simulated TELNET traffic from a number of PCs replaying various shell user scenarios (ls,
vi, cc, f77, etc). Needless to say, the system didn't stay up for more than about 10 minutes at a time. I
ported their test hardness to EMPOWER so that it could be used by engineering, and it is still used to this
day).